Philips Novallure Candle LED Bulbs

[ludditeal]

I am about to take a plunge on ordering some LED lamps to fit in some of our multi-lamp light fittings.

I am opting for the Philips Novallure candle bulbs which it says are compatible with leading edge dimmers. They will be hooked up to QLD001 outputs.

Couple of questions

1) Anyone tried these and had any issues/problems?
2) How many bulbs will the QLD-001 support. I have one light fitting which has 5 bulbs in it (Hence the appeal!). This would be the maximum on 1 channel. The rest are mainly 3 bulb holders.

There is a datasheet here
http://www.lighting.philips.com/pwc_...lusters-v2.pdf

Cheapest I have found them is £12 each delivered for the 4w flame with E14 fitting.

Thanks
Allan

[toscal]

The 4W as far as I can see produces 250lm from experience with other LED bulbs this is about equivalent to a 25 to 30W incandescent bulb.
You may find this Philips document on dimming interesting reading.
One thing you will find with dimmable LED bulbs is that an LED bulb maintains it colour temp as it is dimmed. Incandescent and halogen bulbs change their colour temp when being dimmed.

[Karam]

Toscal, thanks for that document link - its a good indicator of the present vagaries of dimmable LED technology.

Allan, we have fiddled around with mapping tables and even the triggering schemes on the QLD modules to create something which improves the control of the 7W Philips downlighters. I'm guessing that maybe the 4W bulbs might have similar drive characteristics as they are from the same manufacturer. There shouldn't be a problem with 5. But as we know too well by now, and the document perhaps encapsulates this, there appear to be many variables so its still at a stage of suck it and see wrt characteristics. Alongside the Philips we are also trying some units from Megaman and NxtGen (SimplyLED). First indications are that they all have different characteristics...

As the Philips document also indicates, different number of bulbs may result in different performance too. For example it appears that a single NxtGen bulb does not turn off completely even when the dimmer is at 0% whereas if you have more in parallel then they do. The others don't appear to exhibit this issue. All seem to work well if there is a resistive load in parallel eg. a dummy 15W incandescent. I know that some sources actually supply dummy loads but its not a great solution when you are just dimming one bulb.

The funny characteristics are not entirely unexpected when you look into what the electronics inside these bulbs have to do and the manufacturers tend to try and tune them to match the more common leading edge dimmer technology, but even then not all leading edge dimmers work in the same way hence even more discrepancies to deal with. In some ways it might be easier if we all just moved to low voltage LEDs (I mean direct drive - not via a transformer) but of course means new wiring - though less so if your control is already via a home automation system

[ludditeal]

Based on the above I have gone ahead and ordered them

The Philips link Toscal gave says to allow a 10% capacity on the dimmer... which is just as well as I can't count . The QLD dimmer channels are 250w which gives 25w of LED dimming capability. In our dining room light it in fact had 6 x 25W bulbs. These have now been swapped for 6 x 4w LED's so now running at 1 watt less than a single replaced bulb - 24w. They are working fine. They dim down to 4% and switch off at 3%. At 4% they are barely on and appear as a yellow column in the light. They seem to hit max brightness when the dimmer is at 70-75%. After that there appears to be no change in light intensity. They are easily as bright as the bulbs they replace which were these halogen capsules inside a candle bulb. As Toscal warned as they dim down they don't go a deeper yellow like halogen, however they do go more slightly yellow. The wife is happy with them which is a plus point and having got the initial batch I will be going for more for the other lamps in the house. They don't make any noise and is no flickering or flashing as they are dimmed up/down.

I am not sure whether we should have a sticky for people to say which branded CFL/LED lights work with the Idratek dimmers?

I have also used these LED light fittings which are a complete lamp/fitting as opposed to a bulb.

http://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Main_Ind...hts/index.html

In practice you can run 5 of them on a QLD channel. Any more than that and they won't dim/flicker. I have bought both the warm white and the Neutral white. I bought the warm white first and whilst they are OK there is a slightly odd yellow tinge on the fringe of the light beam so for the second order I went for Neutral light which we prefer. These are great in that they are IP66 rated for Bathroom use, have intumescent seals and are rated to use in proximity to flammable materials. They also come with lenses which you can interchange on the front to change the beam angle which in my experiments were effective although I have left them all with the default 50 degree angle installed.

Regards
Allan

[Karam]

Allan,

Always good when someone else does the work for you . Thanks for that information. I looked at the LEDlite product description via your tlc link. Looks like the LED driver is separated out from the LED itself? Slightly confusing in their spec list is saying that the wattage is 10.4W yet also quoting a 90% saving on a 50W GU10. Also interesting is your experience that the number of LEDs affects the dimming characteristics seemingly abruptly. I wonder therefore if this will be consistent or whether we will find elsewhere that 4 bulbs or 6 bulbs is the turning point. But anyhow the fact that these two work fairly well within straight out of the box suggests that only minotr tweaks might be necessary should consistency be found to be a problem.